This New App Takes Your iPhone Videos to the Next Level

Get to know KnowMe.

Posting videos on social media is nothing new: Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, and Youtube all allow you to share film clips. But none of them let you edit your work in-app before you post it. As of this week, there’s an app that enables you to shoot, edit, and share video projects in one place. KnowMe fuses the fundamental concepts of iMovie, Instagram, and YouTube. With it, you can record real-time content with your iPhone’s camera, choose photos from your camera roll, search for images from the web, and record voiceover narration. You can even add music (meaning Taylor Swift could soon be the literal soundtrack of your life). Basically, KnowMe lets you cut together high-quality video projects on the fly and share them to all your favorite social media networks. However, it also offers a space where you can watch friends’ KnowMes and post your KnowMes for your followers to see. Cool, right?

It sounds like the perfect app for an aspiring documentarian – which would make sense, considering it was created by Andrew Jarecki, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who also started the website Moviefone. “I was making this [HBO] series called The Jinx, and I had interviewed about 100 people for it. I was really struck by how driven people are to tell you their stories, how it’s such a compelling basic human need,” he tells Teen Vogue. “It felt natural to me that [storytelling] should be something you could do with your mobile device.” Andrew explains that he saw video apps divided into two camps: the first-person, present-tense social platforms like Snapchat, and the professional-quality editing software like Final Cut and Adobe Premiere. He couldn’t find an app that an average person could use to create a high-quality video.

The name “KnowMe” dawned on him soon after. “Everybody wants to be known for who they are. Some people want to be famous, okay — but a lot people just want to be heard. They just want to have their voice out there. I produce the television show Catfish and I’ve been amazed by the amount that people want to put themselves out there, so much so they are creating fake versions of themselves.” To combat that artificiality, he set out to create an app that would prioritize authenticity, and the KnowMe team has since expanded to include executives from BuzzFeed and Time, Inc. J.J. Abrams — yes, the J.J. Abrams who directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens — is also an investor.

So why do you need KnowMe? I’m personally not a filmmaker, so it took a little while for me to understand why it’s so relevant. Nowadays, social media is becoming more and more homogenized, and it’s harder to set yourself apart on Instagram. But unlike photos, each KnowMe is not just a post — it’s a project viewers can engage with, and it reflects who you are and how you see the world. It takes the idea of a Snapchat story a step further, finding a happy medium between a Snap and a YouTube video. Just think about it — this app could be golden for vloggers who want to record an entire beauty how-to as they get ready for school in the morning, or a quick recipe video while dinner’s on the stove. A “video diary” would no longer be a lethargic teen talking into a camera — it could be a teen narrating her experiences as she shows them to you, having captured them throughout the day. For bloggers who attend fashion shows, reporters on the street covering protests, and aspiring film directors in high school, KnowMe could be a great platform to showcase and share their work. “Kids are speaking the language of video already,” Andrew says. And now, with his app, we can all become visual storytellers.